Musical signatures
Something I’ve been thinking about for a few minutes now: musicians’ “signature” elements that could be recognized even if used by others. A few nights ago, a friend and I were playing guitar, and I referred to what I call “the Velvet Underground” riff. It’s most recognizable as the riff from “Here She Comes Now” (starts at about 0:06 in this video), but you can hear it in “Waiting for My Man,” briefly in “European Son,” and slight variations underlie both “I Found a Reason” and “Pale Blue Eyes.” I hope this gives the flavor of what I’m thinking of: instrumental (as opposed to production, vocal, or lyrics-based) commonalities between several of an artist’s songs, that a listener might come to associate unconsciously with that artist’s “sound.” A couple other, famous examples are the Bo Diddley beat and the Hendrix chord. I’m always one for music lists, so let me know if you’ve got any good examples of musical signatures, and I’ll update this post when I think of more.
ALI abandons its death penalty work
I’m reading today’s NYT piece on the ALI’s withdrawal from the legal debate surrounding the death penalty and listening to David Kitt’s cover of “Teenage Riot.” It occurs to me that, for their loud adherence to a position that (granted) seems at first like it ought to be true even in the face of ever-accumulating evidence that it is not, those who insist that capital punishment is a good and reasonable public policy are an awful lot like those who insist that Sonic Youth have ever recorded more than one really good song.
Status
- @Dharmishta Thus explaining why tickets were $650 when I looked last week. Should have got on that sooner — anyway, have fun! in reply to Dharmishta 33 mins ago
Asides
- Just a note to say I've added a Zipcar affiliate link to my list. If you're signing up, using my link will give each of us $25. #
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This is good. David Foster Wallace, writing for Harper's in 2001, covers the Usage Wars and standard written English, in (of course) his own idiolect (which idiolect1 (q.v. Infinite Jest) makes the hard parts go down easier). Wallace was a walking liberal arts education. #
- In the context of the below, here's a small patch for Mark Grabanski's amazing "Clean Calendar" — a lightweight, pop-up calendar for selecting dates on web forms. My edits forbid users from selecting dates in the past. #
- Weekend to the Winds is a new project I'm working on for a final project in a (cross-registered) computer science class. Watch this space. #
